Every once in a while I like to check sites for broken or dead links - especially in the comments sections, but most importantly regarding sites I've linked to. I also like to test the crawlabitity (is that even a word? LOL) of a site just to be sure that search engines can follow everything smoothly and have the ability to index everything once they visit. Both are good things to check for when doing on-site SEO and I hope all of you know about it and are doing it.

The reason I'm in the market for new tools is that it appears the ones I used to use are no longer in existence. So if you know of any, please leave a comment or contact me via the contact page to send me an email. Thanks!

First off, STOP WASTING MY TIME!!!

Those of us in affiliate marketing, whether new or well seasoned, have our inboxes slammed daily with new offers, products, etc. I am always open to hearing about new innovative ideas, techniques and strategies. This is how those of us who earn incomes from affiliate marketing learn and grow. You have to embrace change and be ready to implement the things you hear about or you end up getting left behind.

That being said, I want to know exactly why you people feel the need to create mile long sales letters and videos that quite honestly, don't contain much information. Sure, there will be some suckers who might hang on every word, but I know I can speak for the majority when I tell you that if your product is really that good, then it shouldn't take you 15-30 minutes to attempt to pre-sell it. Seriously!

These techniques might have worked for you several years ago, but the internet has changed and the people looking at your offers have changed. You all know that "instant information" is the name of the game these days so why are you not using this to your advantage? The people you are marketing to no longer want to see the fluff and stuff you fill your sales letters and videos with.

Here is a general outline of what we want to see:

• The name of your product and a maybe a quick sub-headline of what it is
• If you include background information about yourself, condense the information down to 2-3 paragraphs - no more. Trust me, you can do this. No one wants to read a full 17" screen of information or watch 10 minutes of video only about yourself. If your product/software is as good as you are about to tell us, we don't need a ten year time line of your accomplishments/bragging rights. Seriously.
• Fill the need. Tell us what the product is, quickly list its features or benefits and briefly how it is better than what may be already out there.
• It's fine to include testimonials, but make sure they are from someone who has actually used the product. Someone you gave or sold a copy to and has actually used it. Otherwise, leave them out until a few months have passed. We already have your "proof".
• Tell us the price and give us an order button.

That's it. Keep it simple. Your customers and visitors are a lot more savvy than what you think. If you feel you have to keep filling your sales page or video with fluff in order to try and sell it, then my guess is that your product is no where near as good as you are trying to make us believe. Even if it is that good and you are making sales, it doesn't necessarily mean it is because of your extended pitch. 98% of the people I talk to scroll through the fluff and don't read it anyway. The majority of us will only read your bullet points and your description/proof of how it fills the need. We then scroll to the order button or click away from the page. Others who buy it have more than likely already been pre-sold on it and won't read your sales page at all.

Believe me, if your product is any good, word will get out and you will see sales like you never dreamed. The fluff, filler, etc. is NOT needed.

Which brings me to my second point - DON'T WASTE MY TIME INSIDE THE PRODUCT EITHER!

If we have spent our hard earned money with you, don't waste our time with fluff inside of the product. Thank us for purchasing and then tell us what we need to know to either use the product or implement the system. Give us all the how to's and how we can use it to fill our need. Nothing makes me more mad than to either buy an ebook or video series and see that the 100 page pdf could have been condensed into 40-50 pages or that I really only needed to watch 3 of the 10 videos because the first 7 were all about you. That or you were only able to take away one usable piece of information from each of the 10.

What prompted this post is the fact that I had an email in my inbox this morning from someone I used to respect about the release of his new product. You cannot get to the primary sales page without watching an 18 minute video where he actually reveals NOTHING about the system. (Well, if your a seasoned pro, you can figure out some of the system he's come up with) But the majority of the video talked about absolutely nothing. Then, once you've watched the video, you have to opt-in in order to even get to the sales page. Once you're there, all it does is rehash what was in the video which was basically.....nothing. He wanted to send me a review copy, give me time to implement the system and then give him a testimonial. I told him in no certain circumstances that unless he changed his selling process that there was no way I even wanted to look at it. I don't want my name associated with anything like that nor would I feel good about telling others about it. At this point, I don't care how good it might be.

The bottom line is keep it simple and get to the point. Gone are the days of the time wasters who spend hours pouring over sales letters, watching videos, etc. and you'll do nothing but make your customers angry if you have a lot of filler content on the inside. Tell us how your product fills our need, show us what it did for you and then get straight to the point once we've purchased it. If you can't do that, then maybe you shouldn't release it at all.

If you are an affiliate marketer who agrees with me here, please take a moment to Digg this, Stumble It, Tweet It, Sphinn It, or whatever social media you use and let's show these people we're serious! Then if you have a marketing blog yourself, go make a post about it as well. Send me a trackback, leave a comment or just contact me with your post and I'll come to your site and do the same. It's way past time for a fresh approach to sales and product launches.

What is true is that the program is not what it used to be. Gone are the days of earning $25 per new user and earning $10, $20, $50 or $100 plus in commissions on items. Just like everyone else, I truly miss the old program.

I know many of you are already asking this question - If there are more profitable programs, why would I want to include eBay? Especially with their new affiliate model?

And I will fire back with a question of my own - How many of you have made for Adsense sites?

Because honestly, when we get right down to it, that is pretty much what the eBay affiliate model has become. The only difference is that our visitor has to take action and buy what we are recommending. If we have done our job in pre-selling the item or attracting the customer who is ready to buy, then this really is not an issue.

Am I saying go out and build a site strictly for eBay? No, not unless eBay is pretty much the only place buyers can purchase the products. What I am saying is, don't completely set it to the side and potentially leave money on the table. You can still see some good success with the program if you place the products on your pages built to attract those who are ready to buy. I can't stress this enough, if you do it right, ebay will pay you on average anywhere from $.14-$.64 per click and some days I have hit as high as over $1.00 or more.

Here is what I am doing to see those numbers:
I now only build my sites using WordPress. The reason is ease of use and flexibility. I run them all as blogs and not just product sites. I use phpBay and phpZon to post products. I only list products on the pages or posts where I have targeted the buyer who is ready to make a purchase. Products do not appear in any other content, but if I reference a product in one of my articles then I usually make a link to the product page for internal linking purposes. When I do list products, I list both Amazon and eBay on the same page - and no more than 3 or 4 items from each. This gives the visitor a comparison and then they make the decision on where to go.

In a nutshell, that's it. The real key to it is only putting the products on the posts/pages where your visitor is likely to have their credit card in hand. These are the pages/posts that convert and ultimately give eBay what they want - in their terms "engaging the visitor" or "visitor value".

I will also say this, there is nothing wrong with adding products from Amazon or another program in your other posts/pages or articles. Since you're not getting paid per click, it just makes sense to do so if there is even a remote possibility of a sale. But when it comes to ePN, only put it on your highly targeted pages/posts. This helps your conversions and in turn, increases the amount you are paid per click.

Sure, it might be possible to earn a little more from Amazon, but if your product is cheaper on eBay, where are your visitors going to go? Let me give you a quick true story before I close. I have a site that I've had since the first days of BANS. It's went through all of the growing pains and is one of the ones that has been de-indexed by Google. It was a great earner (still is) and has always gotten a ton of traffic from Yahoo and MSN, which is why I kept it. Several months back I reworked it into a blog and did just what I described above. The site averages around 110 clicks per day. EPC for this campaign is $.24. I don't know about you, but I will not turn away an extra $26.40 per day. And this with traffic from Yahoo and MSN only. Just think what the possibilities could be if it were still in Google. Of course that figure is no where close to what the site used to earn, but it's still earning something and I'll take it.

All I am saying is don't throw it out the window just because the way we earn money money has changed. While it is substantially less than what we earned before, it is still possible to earn quite a bit of extra cash by integrating it on your site.

Like it or not, video is here to stay and gains more popularity with each day that passes. However, thousands of marketers have not even begun to utilize it when it comes to marketing their sites. There are many reasons for this and we'll talk about those as well as how this software can and does solve those problems.

The first reason many marketers haven't taken advantage of video in their site promotion is lack of knowledge. They ultimately want to, but do not know how or where to begin. Another is that they do not want to lay out a lot of money for expensive software or learn the required technical knowledge to run it. Many others are just not comfortable speaking into the microphone and some of us just don't like the sound of our own voice.

This software solves many of those problems. It is very easy to use without much of a learning curve. It's pretty straight forward and simple to use for those worried about technical skills. For those who are uncomfortable with speaking, this software is perfect as you do not have to do any talking. You simply choose a background, copy your articles into slides and set background music if you want to. Save the file and then begin uploading to your chosen video sites.

And for those worried about expensive costs, how does $17 sound?

Now for those who are more advanced and may be wondering why they would need something like this, let's address that for a minute. Because if you're not using video in your site promotion efforts, you are losing out on a ton of traffic and quality backlinks. And even if you are, this software will quickly and easily let you add even more videos to your channel.

I'm going to be conservative here so let's say you have a site with 20 articles on it. You can take those articles and very quickly make 20 videos out of them. It's as simple as cut and paste. Then upload them at a rate of one or two a week. You have the ability to do this for every article on your site.

Do you also write for eZineArticles or any other number of directories? Make videos for those articles as well. Do you have a ton of PLR content wasting away on your hard drive? Simply add your links and make videos for those, too. Add some social bookmarking to each of your videos and submit your RSS feed for your accounts to the RSS feed directories and you now have a whole new powerhouse of building traffic and backlinks for your sites. One more thing, I forgot to mention, you can add links to your websites right in to your videos.

These are just a few quick ideas and barely scratches the surface of what you could use this for, but are you beginning to see the power of what Instant Video Articles can do for you?

This software was just released yesterday and I have added it to my marketing arsenal. Once I test a few things, I will be creating a guide to help everyone who orders from me to get the most out of using it and will send it to you free of charge. Click on the box below to watch the short video to see the features or to order. Until next time......

Instant Video Articles

However, submitting the same exact article to all of the articles sites is going to do you way more harm than good. First of all, the most reputable directories hand check your article and must approve it before it will show up on their site. Your article must also pass a duplicate content check as well. If they find any other instance of your article or anything close to it anywhere on the web, your submission will not be approved. Second, search engines will place a heavy discount on those links if they are all linking from the exact same content. And yes, search engine bots are smart enough to figure this out.

It's a little different story if an individual webmaster decides to republish your content and give you the credit. Once again, the bots are smart enough to figure out whether the links are coming from directories or an individual website. The links will carry more weight coming from an individual site.

Proper article marketing requires creating a separate, unique article for each site. I know that writing and re-writing articles is a tedious, time consuming task. And it's one that most all of us hate. I know that I would sure love to have all the hours back that I've wasted on it, but it is necessary if you want your articles approved and gain those all important backlinks.

The good news is I have FINALLY found a true way to speed up this process. The Best Spinner has to be the most revolutionary article spinner I've ever come across. I've never seen one with features that will even come close to or compare with what this one can do. You can take your original article, spin it hundreds of times and it will actually give you a well-written, unique, easy to read article every time. All with just a few clicks.

Now before you flame me for this, I encourage you to go to the site, watch the video and see it in action. I don't really care whether you get it or not, just go watch the video and see all of the features! I've tried many different spinners in the past and not one of them can touch The Best Spinner. The ones I tried to use before all fell short which is why I've never recommended one. I consider this the best article spinner, bar none. In my opinion, the rest are useless.

If you do any article marketing at all, I would rate this as a top 5 must have tool. With this software, you can have it done in record time and be submitting the articles to your favorite places in less than the time it would take you to re-write the first version of your article.

Once you watch the video, just imagine what you can do with all of those PLR articles gathering dust on your hard drive.

On a more serious note, if some of you think I'm just throwing this at you for the sake of making a few sales, you'd be wrong. Those of you that know me know that I NEVER recommend anything I don't personally use myself. I only recommend the things that I use and that have helped me make running my business easier.

There is no cost or opt-in required to watch the video. I encourage you to see it. I can't wait for you to see how easy re-writing your articles can be. Click here to watch The Best Spinner video.

Now, is that an affiliate link and do I stand to earn a commission if you purchase? Yes. I feel affiliate links are fair on our own websites, especially you are being honest and were the one who brought  it to your readership. But you are welcome to just use the main site address and bypass the affiliate link. However, if you do decide to buy and purchase it through my link, Contact me here and send me a copy of your receipt. I am putting together an awesome bonus for those who do.

If you don't want to get it now or don't have the funds, that's ok, you can still see the video. But I would highly advise getting this somewhere down the line. Take care All and I'll talk to you soon!

I am writing this in response to several emails I have received in the last two weeks from a few wanting to know how to make instant profits. I'm sorry people, if you are looking to find some instant tactic for earning money, my blog is not where you need to be.

Sure, there are new products and methods launched every day that can possibly make you some bank in a very short period of time, but what you need to know is that it is not sustainable. In other words, ask yourself if what you are using will still work a year from now. I've been in this game for many years now and I can already tell you that it won't. It may make you a lot of money on the start, but as more and more people come on board with it, the less effective it becomes and your profits will go down. Way down. You might possibly then be left over starting from scratch -- and no one wants that.

I've said this before and I will say it again - your time and efforts are much better spent building for the long haul and not the "pie in the sky" instant gratification most products seem to promise these days. Choose your path wisely.

The road to riches does not have to be a long one. If you choose your niche(s) well and can devote anywhere from 1-4 hours a day, you can realistically replace your current income in 6 months to a year. However, you have to be willing to do the work. There is no "Easy" button. If there was such a thing, we'd all be retired and meeting up for drinks in the Bahamas. Lol.

We all have to start somewhere and there is a TON of advice on where to begin spread out all over the web. The best advice I can give you is to pick something, master it and then move on to the next. Very soon, you will have a broad skill set that you can apply to everything else you do in the future. This is the point when you become powerful and will be successful, no matter what you build.

Here are the basic steps that I go by when I want to get into a new niche and is the path that has proven most successful for me:

1. Research the niche
2. If potentially profitable, then go test the niche on a few Web 2.0 properties such as Squidoo, HubPages, EzineArticles, Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, UsFreeAds, etc. I then build a few backlinks to each of these pages and let it set for a week or two. What I am looking for here is the amount of traffic these pages get.
3. If the traffic from the above efforts is good for the niche and results in a few sales, then I feel comfortable enough to build a stand alone site for it.
4. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I'll talk more later about each step and possibly even show some examples, but this is the general principle I have used to become successful. It is not rocket science and it can work for you too, but again, you have to be willing to sit down and do it.

For now, I have to get back to work. I'll speak to you all soon!

If I were a betting person, I'd lay odds that you probably do your niche research backwards. That is, brainstorm for a niche, head over to your favorite keyword tool and start drilling down to find keywords with the most searches and the least amount of competition. This is all well and good, but in the end, stop and think about it - what have you really found? A list of words you may or may not want to target later on. Now why would I say, may or may not? Because you still have not done the market research for your niche.

I could sit here all day long and come up with thousands of keywords in hundreds of niches with thousands of searches that no one else is competing for, but what I still do not know is whether or not there is a market for what I'm researching. Until I've done my market research, all I've done is waste my time finding low competition keywords. That's it.

So here is where I'm going to try and reverse your research tactics a bit and show you how to know there is a market for the products you want to promote and how to get into the niche - even if it's highly competitive. Believe me, there is room in every niche for affiliates.

One of the best ways to find a new niche market is to browse the very sites you are affiliating yourself with using their Best Selling or Most Popular features. Most major sites now list what their bestsellers are. Below I will show you how to find these products for a few sites.

• eBay - Go to eBay and click on the Buy button on the top right. It is in line with the Sell, My eBay, Community and Help buttons. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will see a link that says "Popular Products". Click this link. It will take you to a page that displays the top 10 products in nearly all of the main categories. These are items that are very popular and selling right now.You can also go to eBay Pulse and view the most watched products in every category on eBay. Now keep in mind that watching is not the same as buying, but it can give you an idea of some of the trends.
• Amazon - like eBay, Amazon has listings for nearly everything under the sun and you can sort your results for every category by Bestselling. This will show you what the best sellers are on Amazon.
• Likewise, Best Buy, Walmart, Bass Pro, Dell, Sears, Sony, and the lists go on and on, all have Best Seller or Popular Product features.

Use these sites to your advantage. You now have the knowledge to step into any of these niches and know before hand that there is a market for them and people are buying them online.

You can dig a little deeper by going to the free Mailing List Finder service. Here you can search offline mailing lists using general keywords and see how many have signed up for newsletters and magazines in your niche. Chances are good that if companies are mailing out ads and publications on your niche topics, there is a viable market for them.

Take it one step further and go to Magazines.com and look for an offline magazine in your niche. If someone is printing a magazine in your niche that is supported by advertisers then you can bet it is profitable for them to do so. Meaning, there is a strong market for it.

Once you have found the niche or products you wish to target, you next step is keyword research. I'm probably going to take some flack for this, but in all honesty, the only keyword tool you need is Google's External keyword tool. What better resource than data from the engine you are looking to rank in itself? As most of us know, if we can rank in Google, we can and will usually easily rank well in any other search engine.

Don't get me wrong, every keyword tool has its place and there are many of them out there to choose from. But what you have to remember is that all keyword databases that can be searched maybe only account for about 2% at best of what is really being searched for online. There is NO tool that will give you an exact count of how many times a word or phrase has been searched. All these tools can do is give you a very general idea.

Keep that in mind the next time you see a keyword or phrase that only shows 50 or 60 searches a month. In reality, it is probably many more times that amount. Think of all the visitors you might have missed simply because you didn't feel that word or phrase worthy of a page or article on your site.

This is basically what I have done for the last year or so and it has proven to be quite a successful model for me. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, so please feel free to leave your comments below.

Since this got a little more lengthy than I had planned, tomorrow I will follow up with how to get into a niche you want even if there is a ton of competition. Stay tuned!

So why talk about this now? First off, it is a new year and there is no time like the start of a fresh new year to begin new things. Second of all, this is something that is going to be part of your ultimate goal for your niches and I wanted to give you something to aim for.

For now, I am going to assume that you have already found a profitable niche. For an example, let's say it has to do with the Nintendo Wii Fit game. Let's say your site is built around only targeting just the game itself and you are gaining traffic and earning a pretty steady chunk of change from it. This is great, but you are very well possibly leaving a lot of money on the table.

Your site is centered around the game only so you do not want to add any more products to it. After all, you have gone to the trouble of building a niche site and as we have all learned, a true niche just targets one product. You've done the research and just do not feel it is justified to build a site targeting the accessories for it, but at the same time, you hate not to. So what do you do?

The solution is simple, hop on over to Squidoo or HubPages (even both) and create lenses or hubs on the accessories. You can only do a few of each on the same subject so be careful here, but you can drop links to your Wii Fit site in the content and promote the accessories using the shopping modules on those pages. You could create one for balance boards, cases, rechargeable batteries, ski/snow boards, etc. These would all be pages with links to your site.

Then hop on over to USFreeAds and create a few ads with the accessories and point those links to the Squidoo Lenses/Hubpages. This gives you external links to those pages as well. You can even set up some ads for the main game site as well.

The plan here is to have as many small ads as you can pointing to your lenses/hubpages and then those pages pointing to your main site. You will still need to gain other external links to all pages, but we have covered a few methods on how to to do that.

Now some will debate that they will not build anything on something they do not directly own. I understand that, really I do. However, these sites still carry a good amount of weight in the search engines and have thousands of daily users. My argument is that none of these things take very long to create and gives you good, solid backlinks to your sites.

If you will do this for just a couple of your sites and let them age, I think you will be pleasantly surprised at the results. My own studies have shown a significant increase in traffic and affiliate earnings and I wholeheartedly believe it will do the same for you.

This is just an example of a small network for your niche site. Once your lower pages age for a few months, the links will begin to carry authority/weight and give you leverage for anything else you might want to promote within the niche.

Just a little food for fodder, if you had big goals of targeting the Wii Game System itself, having this small network of sites and pages would ultimately give you a boost in rankings when you get to that point. I will talk more about this later, but as I said, I just wanted to give you all a little something to aim for in the new year.

I will talk with you all soon!

I and many others are living proof that this system does work and I have secured a nice discount for my readers here on the blog. If you were ever on the fence about getting the manual, now is the time. This normally sells everyday for $17 and I was able to get you a discount of $10 off! That's right, you can now get it for $7!

The Cash By Choice System gives you a truly simple system to begin earning or even making more money. In just a few minutes a day, you can apply what you've learned in the manual and not only gain a backlink to your site, product or service, but you'll begin earning more traffic and sales.

I will warn you, the guide applied the tactics to mainly Clickbank products and the like, however the information is best applied to individual products or websites. I will go into further explanation of this in a future post and show you all how I use the information.

The guide and I both recommend upgrading your USFreeAds account to get the most out of this information, but if that is just not possible for you or you want to test the waters with it first, that is ok too. You just will not be able to post as many ads or use HTML in them. It's still a backlink to whatever you are trying to promote and it will still be seen.

For now, go ahead and get the Cash By Choice System and make sure you have a USFreeAds account - whether it's free or paid.

I will give you some tips in the next couple of posts on how to get the most out of the information. I will speak to you all soon!

Much has happened over the last year. Around the first of last year, I developed some pretty severe health problems and had a drastic change of careers in my offline world. Due to all of that, I had to let some things in my online world slide a bit and just focus on my own projects during the last 12 months.

Not to mention, I wanted to test some things that were circulating around on the internet. Not only for my own sake, but for the sake of my readers as well.

One thing I would like to report, BANS is NOT dead in the water as most would like you to believe. I know, my last post reflected that I could no longer recommend the popular site builder. Conflicting and confusing, to say the least. Yes, I was pretty bitter over the de-indexing of nearly all of my sites - including my top earners. I thought since I had escaped all other "slaps" that I was safe. However, when I really scrutinized those sites, and I mean stepped back and objectively looked at them, I came to the conclusion that it was really all my own fault.

I "thought" I had a lot of great content and articles on those sites along with the listings, but in all honesty, I didn't. In the end, they were thin affiliate sites. Very few pages would have actually stood alone in the eyes of a search engine and when you took away the listings, the sites were really of no value to the world wide web.

So, I decided to eat my crow and try once more. This time following the N1Way Guide that the builders of BANS put together. My thoughts were to give it one more try and see if I could make a site stick. The end result was that it worked out fabulously for me. I'm sorry folks, I'm not going to share the site here. I am done sharing my big money sites in a public fashion. But I will say that I followed the guide to the letter and now have a few sites that are earning great money per month - even with eBay's new affiliate model. Matter of fact, I think the sites perform better on the new ebay structure than they did before.

Did I learn anything new from the guide? Not really. They were all steps that I already knew needed to be taken, I just never followed through with everything I needed to do for every site. The guide did help me lay it all out, step by step, and gave me a checklist to follow and focus on for each site I built.

In all honesty, the knowledge contained in the Niche Site Blueprint is applicable no matter what you are using to build your Niche Affiliate Sites. It is not just for BANS or WordPress/phpBay users only. The guide is literally for anyone in this type of business that is wanting to succeed. It is good, sound advice for any building platform. If you have not had a chance to read it, then I encourage you to get a copy. If you follow the advice and do the work, and I mean really do the work.... I can almost promise you that you will be earning five to six figures a year from now.

If you don't want to purchase the guide, that's ok. A lot of the most important steps have already been highlighted here on my blog and many others. I will see if I can find a collage of the best posts around the web that will give you a guide, or structure, to follow.

My phpBay sites are still performing for me just as wonderfully as they always have. The two that were de-indexed, once again, was my own fault. There was nothing but listings on both of them. Pretty much no content whatsoever. The plugin is still a quite stable performer and valuable asset to my WordPress sites.

There are a few other plugins I haven't mentioned much about to you all that I will soon be talking about. Some of you will know of them, but most will not. I'm excited to be bringing you the information about them.

I am also finishing up some testing regarding how those of you who cannot spend any money can get started in affiliate marketing for absolutely nothing. I am also excited to bring you these results. There has been demand all along for those who wanted to get started in affiliate marketing, but did not have any money to spend. I hope to maintain a healthy balance of my posts between the information for those who are new and those who are veterans to the industry.

I also want to report that the project with USFreeAds has also been a huge success. I will see if I can revive that post and get you all a discount for the ebook, if you have not already bought it. Once again, the information within it is a goldmine if you will actually do the work.

All in all, I believe 2010 is going to be an exciting year for us all and I hope you will stick around for the ride. So, for those of you I haven't heard from in a while, what have you been up to? How are things faring for you?

Take care my friends and I will talk to you soon!